Give America American Workers
by
Phil Rasmussen

For four years America had to put up with Biden’s illegal open border policies.  Prior to Biden’s presidency, Trump had the plan in place to reduce illegal border crossings with a border wall across our southern border with Mexico.  Additionally Trump wanted to revise the H-1B visa, calling it “unfair” to American workers.

Last month, Sriram Krishnan, Trump’s artificial intelligence advisor, advocated the need to remove the caps on the H-1B visa program.  This raised the ire of some Republicans and has stirred a debate on the value, purpose and conditions of the H-1B visa program. 

The H-1B visa was developed in 1990 to allow US employers to hire foreign workers to fill positions in highly skilled and specialty occupations, “including but not limited to biotechnology, chemistry, computing, architecture, engineering, statistics, physical sciences, journalism, medicine and health (doctors, dentists, nurses, physiotherapists, etc.), economics, education, research, law, accounting, business specialties, technical writing, theology, and the arts.”  Visa applicants must have a bachelor’s degree or higher, or “distinguished merit and ability.”

In addition to specific requirements for the visa applicants, there are also specific regulations that sponsoring employers must follow.  In case you missed it, “research” and “technical” are two specialty occupations often found in our universities and Silicon Valley development companies.

While there are many pros and cons to the H-1B visa program the program also has many supports and detractors.  One supporter, yet critic, of the program is Elon Musk who posted on X, "I have said it countless times in the last 2 years & will say it again: the H-1B system is badly broken & should be replaced with one that focuses on selecting the very best of the best (not a lottery), pro-competitive (no indentured service to one company), and de-bureaucratized."

Forbes reported that Vivek Ramaswamy, also a supporter of H-1B, criticized American values, stating "American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long . . .  A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math Olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers."

Both Musk and Ramaswamy recognize that if America is to continue to maintain its status on the world stage, H-1B is necessary if we do not improve our educational system and change our cultural values to a desire to learn, develop a good work ethic, and supporting innovation.  In other words we need to get away from:

• ·   worshiping personalities and their rhetoric,
• ·   sports and its high paying salaries and celebrities
• ·   entertainment supporting immoral and unethical values

And return to our basic American values by:

• creating individual freedom and self-reliance,
• supporting equality (not equity) of opportunity and competition, and
• achieving the American dream through hard work.

We do this by remaking our educational system that:

• eliminates diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) curriculum in our schools,
• requires educators to teach the subject they were hired for and not interject their personal biases and beliefs,
• stresses intramural competition that includes all students,
• eliminates all internural competition, ending the cash cow that so many schools, colleges and universities depend on,
• stops promoting students to the next level until they achieve the requirements of their current level,
• returns to basic teaching methodology instead of implementing unproven methodologies, and
• requires not only a return to reading, writing and arithmetic, but also to required physical education for all students.

In addition to revamping our educational system, we also need to reintegrate family values which fulfill the development of mind, body, and spirit.